Spoilers Star Trek: Strange New Worlds 3x07 - "What Is Starfleet?"

[Jedi Marso]

Randomly…I wonder what Batel does all day while Pike is on duty. Like, is she on leave or is she doing somekind of administrative work.

I would think there is no end of administrative work that Batel could do remotely for Starfleet while on 'light duty', so to speak. April probably keeps her electronic in-box full of stuff he either needs reviewed or doesn't have time to deal with himself. Staff work.

 

[Mudd]

I feel this would have worked far better if it had been a regular episode and then after the episode you get the “documentary”. Similar to the short treks that they had going for a while.

There was no point to doing this story for the hundredth time without tackling it from an unexpected POV.

 

[XCV330]

That is correct the flag officer and his associated staff. The writers, without a Navy background, get flagship confused with capital ship all the time. I just let it slide, since it is fiction. A flagship means the ship is carrying the Admiral of a group of ships travelling together. In actual military navies, the Admiral is a flag officer and the ship carrying the Admiral is the flagship. To confuse the issue even more, some navies have ceremonial flagships, with no admiral aboard. For the United States, the ceremonial flagship is the sailing ship USS Constitution, commissioned in the late 1700s and still afloat today.

Also, in TNG episode Redemption II, Picard is given permission by Admiral Shanthi to assemble a fleet to stop Romulan Incursions on the Klingon / Romulan border, Picard is filling the position as an actual flag officer. The Admiral should have given Picard the temporary rank of at least Commodore (USN would call it a Rear Admiral LH) to let the fleet know who is in charge of the operation, in order to have a clear chain-of-command. Another occurrence where it would be the flagship of the group, as defined by most navies.

OTOH the US.Coast Guard, which doesn't follow Navy traditions and in some ways has a mission closer to Starfleet, seeing as their own are a bit older, has its flagship as the USCGC Eagle, their sail training barque. Unlike old Ironsides in the NAVY, she is still considered an active ship. She's symbolic of the service as a whole.

So a large cutter like the USCGC Legare might occasionally have an admiral on board, but it's still not the flagship.

 

[Therin of Andor]

So they flat out mention the Gorn Hegemony in a publicly released documentary? Guess Kirk never caught this one. M'Benga must've told him to skip it.

In-ship security cameras!? OK the 'SNW isn't canon' people might have a point!

Maybe the doco doesn't get released until after Kirk meets the Gorn?

I seem to recall Kirk replaying bridge footage of Ben Finney in "Court Martial"?

 

[Mudd]

Yep.

I think placing the initial locked-camera shot of the bridge at a high, panoramic angle focused on the Chair might be a nod to that episode. Or simply logical. Either way.

 

[valkyrie013]

MOTHRA!!!

That was cool. was kinda huh? at the beginning, but I enjoyed it.
(Under breath.. 289 meters.. cough)

 

[DEWLine]

I would think there is no end of administrative work that Batel could do remotely for Starfleet while on 'light duty', so to speak. April probably keeps her electronic in-box full of stuff he either needs reviewed or doesn't have time to deal with himself. Staff work.

Probably specific to whatever sector/system that the Enterprise was visiting at the time. Checking in on local bases, research projects, etc.?

 

[Nerys Myk]

Plus, Jessie Gender lays out clearly how the staging fails the Trek theme.

How exactly did it do that?

 

[eschaton]

How exactly did it do that?

If I could summarize the message of the episode in a single sentence, it's "The system works." If you look at Star Trek as portraying a more optimistic future, that's completely fine as a message. But if you think of Star Trek as being an allegorical mirror held up to our present, it does come across as a bit icky.

She was hoping for something which was a bit more nuanced ala DS9, which didn't shy away from the dark underbelly of Starfleet. YMMV.

 

[Greg Cox]

There are several episodes of TOS that have inconsistent writing, but there are several that also dispel that Starfleet is purely military.

There's nothing wrong with evolving it to be even less so in 80 years. People change. Roddenberry changed.

True, but note that SNW takes place before TNG, so, chronologically, it should feel more like Kirk's Starfleet than Picard's.

In a larger sense, just because Roddenberry changed his mind doesn't mean that TNG trumps TOS in terms of how future shows should portray Starfleet and the Federation. We can still prefer or go back to more of a TOS feel . . . as DS9 and DISCO arguably did . . . or take a whole new approach in the future.

Point being, TNG is not necessarily the gold standard to which all Trek shows, past and present, need to adhere to.

(Personally, I prefer 1966 Roddenberry to 1987 Roddenberry, but, of course, that's just a matter of taste.)

 

[Tuskin38]

we were missold a documentary masquerading as an episode

No we weren't.

If I could summarize the message of the episode in a single sentence, it's "The system works."

I disagree. Because Pike questions the orders.

 

[ToddCam]

Maybe the doco doesn't get released until after Kirk meets the Gorn?

I seem to recall Kirk replaying bridge footage of Ben Finney in "Court Martial"?

Kirk also didn't know who Surak was.

 

[Tuskin38]

Kirk also didn't know who Surak was.

Or that Sarek was Spock's father.

 

[Mudd]

The standard is set by TOS. The later series improve in technique and vary in content.

There is no "overarching Star Trek theme" other than what academics and essayists want to construct and elevate to suit their purposes.

There are many themes and narrative threads and points of view represented in the original series - almost as many as there were episodes, appropriately enough for a series that gestated as a variation on the anthology format.

If there was a grounding premise that ran through the series, it was only a generalized faith in progress and the continued successful evolution of the liberal state, dramatized as a humane future culture characterized by curiosity and initiative, as embodied in a nebulously defined exploratory/military force from which the characters putatively derived their authority and direction.

 

[ToddCam]

Just before coming to this thread I watched a YouTube video about a TikTok trend where "nerding out" was being decried by some as being usurped by normies who were nerding out on Labubus and Crumbl cookies. There is something fun about juxtaposing that with the ultimate "classic" nerd idea of obsessing over what "happened" in the future history that by definition didn't happen.

I know that's not what this thread is about, but it was just funny to me to see how much humans obsess over the most inane things like definitions of military and nerd, and how the specific subject matter changes, it's still something we do no matter how old we are or what "generation" we are. And it's something I both love and hate about our species.

 

[UssGlenn]

Funnily enough, @Maurice and I were talking yesterday afternoon , before I saw the episode, about how much Trek has always gotten wrong about the Navy and naval parlance and practice. GR and Coon were both WWII Army veterans...

They gave themselves a bit of an out for that: "It's a combined service"

If I could summarize the message of the episode in a single sentence, it's "The system works."

I disagree. Because Pike questions the orders.

But if Pike is allowed to question his orders and change his superiors minds then that's part of the system.

 

[saladdays]

Not bad, but not great. Average story. However, the shaky-cam documentary style made the episode almost unwatchable for me at times. Even got a little nauseated from it. Also, i had to turn on the subtitles and rewind a lot to get the dialogue. I found it very distracting and it made it difficult to follow.

If you think this was "shaky-cam" then I recommend you never watch a found footage genre film.

 

[indranee]

I first watched this back on early Thursday morning. Loved it but (thankfully) waited to grade it until a second watch later. Watched it again last night... still love it but will be grading it down a notch bc I really don't feel the whole "what starfleet did to my sister" B theme. In hindsight, Uhura was absolutely right to call Beto on his BS. And as someone who lost her only sibling and has had suffered ten years of guilt and remorse for not doing more to prevent his death, Beto's anguish somehow doesn't ring true... at least to me. And to be honest, until this episode, I didn't feel there was any bad blood between Beto and Erica... there was really no setup there. So Beto's issues with Erica and the whole thing -- at least to me -- came out of the blue.
As far as the docustyle technique, I'm fine with it, but I am still a little iffy on some of the fly on the wall recording scenes. I'm assuming Pike was okay with it and was just ignoring the drone hovering beyond the corner/wall? Or did he not notice it?
What really sold this episode to me was Uhura's story. I am someone who grew up in traumatic circumstances (and formed a tight bond with my brother while doing so) and then when I lost him (and subsequently, my entire family), it remade me in ways I hadn't anticipated. The hurt and pain are still very raw and I pretty much began to cry during her scenes. I felt her pain very deeply. Isn't that part and parcel of good/great TV/film?
The last ten mins were also excellent and brought it all together. And I must say some of the acting in this episode surpassed my best expectations.
I have friends who hate this episode. I'm still waiting to discuss it with a friend who is a vet and is not ecstatic about it. I understand what Jessie Gender is trying to say. But I was around and active on the newgroups/google groups during the first airing of In The Pale Moonlight, and this kind of reaction reminds me of the reaction to ITPM at the time. We shall see where this goes, but my take is that while controversial this episode will be held as one of SNW's best, if not one of Trek's best.
I'm grading it down to a 9.

 

[Starkers]

I forgot to mention the thing that got me most excited. As someone who's worked in the field of Freedom of Information for almost 20 years, the reference to the UFP having a Freedom of Information Act was cooler than most people could possible imagine (and its not just me, one of my best friends is a Trek fan and she works in a similar field and she was similarly jazzed to see it!)

 

[saladdays]

I forgot to mention the thing that got me most excited. As someone who's worked in the field of Freedom of Information for almost 20 years, the reference to the UFP having a Freedom of Information Act was cooler than most people could possible imagine (and its not just me, one of my best friends is a Trek fan and she works in a similar field and she was similarly jazzed to see it!)

I worked in the legal field for many years and made many FOIA requests so I appreciated that too.